No man, woman, child, or house, with the pie

William Jones wrote a book, THE SANSCRIT LANGUAGE, to tell that GREEK and LATIN had a common root with SANSKRIT, and there must have been a Proto-Indo-European language from which many modern languages derive.

MAN

I do not know Sanskrit. I can only compare resources. The morpheme –man, quoted by supporters of the PIE, yet refers to thinking, not gender, whereas it is common lore that masculinity is not strictly synonymous with pensiveness. 😉

HOUSE

Vir or andros, child or riebienok, woman or kobieta ― the words do not resemble one another, and they are the basic vocabulary that hardly ever changes. This is the vocabulary to compare for language grouping.

Language groups work better than language families. “Families” derive languages, one from another.

Why derive from Sanskrit, if there might have been influence on Sanskrit?

Proto-languages are theoretical constructs. Taking the Russian and Polish words for children, to have a word form for precedent to both dziecko and riebienok, we would have to actually create or make up a “proto-word”.

Even if we created a form as *dieriebko, the form would not evidence that such a word ever existed. Honestly, it is unlikely.

Further, languages do not develop in isolation, where there is trade or other contact, and Marco Polo was not probably the first visitor to the Far East.

Let us think there is language A. Some people come around and adopt grammar for verbs, from A entirely. They do not refer to language A for everything, however. They already have spoken language B.

The people to talk B make progress; they begin to come up with new words. Language A begins to adopt from language B.

If we find a phrase or word in Sanskrit today, it does not mean the wording has been there since the beginning of time.

Decent linguistic work requires original sources for evidence. The Rosetta Stone was absolutely unique.

In other words, the best source for comparative linguistic evidence in human history so far, the Rosetta Stone allowed translation, but not word derivation.

There was never even a stone like the Rosetta, for “Indo-European” languages.

Carbon dating

Whenever possible, written resources should be carbon-dated. There is no philological method to affirm originality beyond evidence. Writings were copied in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and later, hand style and pen craft.

There is no acknowledged C14 evidence for the Proto-Indo-European. Researchers who claim linguistic evidence have had marginal recognition only, because of their data poor quality, readWIKIPEDIA, PIE HISTORY OF RESEARCH.

Oldest does not mean wisest

What rationale could there be for constructing probabilistic language forms? Linguistically, there is none. Machine or otherwise constructed, a code is not a natural language.

On the side of language psychology, I do not share in the enthusiasm or fascination with speculative ancient content.

Quotient always has been a matter of the human individual and education, or self-study. People and languages were not more sophisticated in ancient times.

Within evolutionary approaches, languages may have emerged independently, owing to human cognitive advancement. Language knowledge became shared, in the process.

Similarities in form as domus, do, and dom, or house and Haus, show geographic affinity to have come with urban and similar developments. They do not decide on language grouping.

However, supporters of the Proto-Indo-European “family” have gone into making the Proto-Indo-European religion too. There is no root in common for all the words here to name our home planet Earth and life on it.